Giving Compass' Take:

• Authors writing for the Stanford Social Innovation Review explain how "new power" approaches to community organizing and fundraising make it possible for those who are not traditionally in positions of power to create meaningful change. 

• How can local communities utilize these techniques to make significant development changes in their neighborhoods? What are some potential barriers when it comes to fundraising? 

• Read about the potential of crowdfunding for philanthropy.

The great imbalances in wealth and power that characterize life on our planet are embedded in the social sector, too. As a spate of recent articles assert, those with disproportionately greater means have disproportionate influence over the trends, fads, and investments that determine the directions we take in this field.

Individuals with power—and the foundations they fund—sometimes prefer incremental change over direct challenges to the social order that produces their wealth. This should come as little surprise, but it can cause activists who seek to undo that order to despair.

Fortunately, a set of organizations from around the world has emerged to challenge this narrative. Drawing from the best of traditional community organizing and "new power" approaches to unleashing large-scale change, they are mobilizing everyday people to have a more meaningful, direct impact on world events.

Inspired in part by electoral movements like the Bernie Sanders campaign, which raised the vast majority of its funds from small-dollar donors, and local participatory budgeting initiatives, which invite citizens to directly determine how government will spend a portion of municipal funds, these efforts seem to fall into three categories:

  1. Groups that combine money for pre-identified investments.  Groups such as Kulturland Genossenschaft provide an interesting example of this first case.
  2. Groups that leverage existing crowds to raise large sums.  Other platforms amass funds from large crowds that are already coming together for another purpose.
  3. Groups that invite contributors to decide what to do with their shared funds. Finally, a third group emulates the model of traditional, in-person giving circles, using the Internet and new voting technologies to help much bigger groups decide together how to spend their pooled funds.

Read the full article about funding by Joe McCannon & Marika Anthony-Shaw at Stanford Social Innovation Review